The Tacit State

In 1958, Michael Polanyi observed that we can know more than we can tell. Three hundred and seventeen thousand federal employees just left the government. Everything they could tell stayed behind. Everything they couldn't tell left with them. In 1958, the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote six words that contain the entire argument against what the Department of Government Efficiency is doing to the federal workforce: we can know more than we can tell. A cyclist cannot describe the physics of balance. A physician cannot articulate what makes one patient's cough alarming and another's benign. A judge cannot specify the formula that produces a just sentence. The knowledge exists. It is real. It works. And it resists every attempt to extract it into rules, procedures, or code. Three hundred and seventeen thousand federal employees left the government in 2025. The Rebuild documented the numbers — the agencies, the percentages, the replacement attempts. This entry is about what t